I used to think that the K12 math education was really bad, but now I have a different perspective. Many public schools in China and Russia are essentially like magnet schools in the US because students need to compete for entrance. So, those schools can afford more challenging syllabus. In contrast, the US has few such magnet schools, and people of different academic capacity go into the same school. As a result, teachers can't really teach too advanced concepts or assign too hard homework. This may sound far-fetched, but you may be surprised that more than 50% of students may never be able to understand Euclidean geometry, let alone analytical geometry or set theory or probability or proof by induction, and etc. And more than 50% of STEM students in college may not truly understand calculus, let alone analysis. Case in point, roughly 50% of middle school students can't get into high school in China, even though the entrance exams are really not that hard as most of the questions are designed to examine a student's understanding of basic concepts. Therefore, we may look at the quality of the math class in the US and feel miserable, but that's only because the class is tailored to the lower 50%-ile. On the other hand, the clubs and gift programs in public schools are still of high quality -- all the more reason for not canceling such programs in the name of equity.